April 08, 2010
The NYT reports that China’s government signed a deal with the state of California and General Electric to provide engineering expertise and high tech parts for the construction of high-speed rail. This is a fascinating and totally predictable story which cause great pain to many purveyors of the economic conventional wisdom (CW).
China has been building high-speed trains, the United States hasn’t. This means that the country has substantially more expertise in this area than the United States. As a result the transfer of this green technology will go from China to the United States, the opposite direction assumed by purveyors of the CW.
More generally, this story shows the absurdity of the assumption of the purveyors of the CW that somehow the U.S. will transfer all its grunt work (i.e. manufacturing) to the developing world and leave the high tech stuff for our smart workers. The reality is that the developing world has hundreds of millions of smart workers who are able to do everything that our smart workers do, but are willing to accept much lower wages. If we subject our more highly educated workers to the same sort of international competition as we have subjected our low-wage workers, they will also lose. This will only change when currencies adjust and wages in the developing world move closer to U.S. levels.
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